Why 85% of Mental Health Patients Don't Improve, and What Braive Is Doing About It
Hermine Bonde Jahren watched her husband's psychology clinic struggle with an ever-growing waiting list and realized the access crisis was only half the problem. She built Braive to fix what happens after you get through the door, and it now supports 100,000 patients across the Nordics.
Only one in three people who access mental health care actually improves. Hermine Bonde Jahren noticed that statistic not as a researcher or a clinician, but as someone watching a gifted psychologist work himself to exhaustion while his waiting list kept growing. The access crisis in mental health is real, but she saw the problem behind it. A system where treatment decisions are driven by clinician preference rather than patient need, where outcomes go unmeasured, and where the psychiatric field has fallen far behind the rest of medicine in its willingness to be data-driven. Braive, the Norwegian platform she co-founded with her husband Henrik Haaland Jahren, was built to change that, and has now supported 100,000 patients across the Nordics.
From selling Scandinavian brands across Southeast Asia to building a mental health platform
Hermine left Norway at fifteen for boarding school and did not return for twenty years. She worked in Australia, then moved to Bangkok in 2009 on what she describes as a whim, setting up a distribution company that imported Scandinavian brands into Southeast Asia. She built it without external capital, grew it to 40 people with offices across Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, and turned it into a business with annual turnover exceeding $10 million.
Henrik had followed her to Bangkok, where he set up a psychology clinic after completing his training in Australia. He was a skilled clinician with one clear goal. Get patients well and get them out the door as quickly as possible.
The clinician who couldn't scale himself, no matter how hard he tried
No matter how many hours Henrik put in, the waiting list kept lengthening. Hermine watched him repeat the same psychoeducational material session after session, explaining the same concepts to different patients because the system offered no other way to prepare them. She also learned that the problem ran deeper than capacity. Henrik was lecturing PhD students in psychology at the time, and what struck them both was how little those students were taught about how to actually treat. Clinicians were entering the field and using whatever methodology they preferred, with no standardized framework for matching treatment to patient need and no systematic way to measure whether it was working.
Henrik travelled to the United States, Canada, and Australia, looking for a platform that solved this. He found nothing. He decided to build it himself, and she took a job to support the early work, then found herself pulled in from the sidelines. The mission was too engaging to watch from a distance. She bought out Henrik's original partner and came in as CEO.
Braive structures treatment around what the patient needs rather than what the clinician prefers. The platform maps a patient's symptoms and life situation, and recommends a treatment direction. A clinician meeting the patient can start the meeting already briefed. The session becomes concentrated on the individual, on what happened that week, on the specific challenges that no algorithm can address. "We don't believe we can remove the human and still have successful therapy," Hermine says. "But there's a lot we can help and support the clinician with on the tech side."
Clinical depth first, because there is no shortcut to credibility
Braive launched with an AI-driven assessment tool and spent years in research partnerships with the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the University of Oslo, building clinical models before large language models existed to run them on. When that technology arrived, Braive had the data, the models, and the evidence already in place. Eighty percent of patients on the platform improve. The company has nearly tripled its ARR and reached forty percent of the occupational health market across Sweden and Norway.
Hermine is clear about what separates Braive from the wave of digital mental health tools that have followed. Many optimize for growth and treat clinical depth as something to layer in later. Braive went the other way. "Our credibility lies in the depth we have in research," she says. "We can't go too far towards the clinical or technical side because then we will never be a commercial product, but we started there because that is the only foundation worth building on."
The next stage is to build a repeatable engine that maintains the same clinical standard in every new market. For Hermine, the urgency is straightforward. "It's just mind-blowing that we haven't come further in terms of treating with solid quality within mental health," she says. "Considering the direction the world is going in, it's really puzzling that not everyone is doing what we're doing."
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